thread: 2005-04-25 : Technical Agenda
On 2005-05-02, Ben Lehman wrote:
Hey, I just thought of something, apropos to the above thread about genre and "real people games."
I was thinking about Breaking the Ice, and how much it is totally genre-agnostic. Emily had an example, which is that you could see Star Wars as a Breaking the Ice game, with Han and Leia as the couple. You can totally do science-fiction Breaking the Ice, fantasy Breaking the Ice, etc.
It's just that it doesn't matter. Why?
Because the game uses an Effectivist technical agenda that even verges on Proceduralist.
The point is, when you're playing a Technical Simulationist game, the focus is on the actions that the characters are taking in the world, rather than what those actions mean. Because of this, it is really easy to narrow your systematic focus down to character abilities, especially since they are the only route to player effectiveness.
And, given that, a really simple way to generate interest is to make the actions themselves interesting, rather than what they mean. This means super-powers, or at least some sort of unreal-to-normal-life element.
If you're going with a Effectivist or Proceduralist scope, then it frees up the mechanical focus to be about things other than what is being done as a gross action. Thus, what is being done can be more mundange, because the focus can be shifted to the interactions between the players, the meaning of the actions, the ramifications for the game, etc.
With GURPS, it would be really boring to play a therapist trying to make it up a long flight of stairs on crutches. I mean, talk about boring! Plus, it is meaningless in the long run.
With Breaking the Ice, we can care about this scene, because it is really about whether or not she gets the sympathy of her date, and whether she gets it in a way that's palatable to her.
yrs—
—Ben
